Hacker News Reader

Comment by eric__cartman | Hacker News Reader

Rather than investing in a phone that can record in 8k (if it even exists) I'd try and look into some entry level "proper" cameras. The bigger sensors and better optics should provide a bump in video quality. Mirrorless cameras aren't very large to lug around when going on vacation or other places where interesting events could be documented.

View on HN

Somewhat surprisingly, it's actually easier to get good-looking footage on an iPhone than say a mid-level mirrorless camera. The iPhone has better built-in stabilisation and handles high dynamic range more conveniently (built-in tone mapping and HDR capture by taking multiple real captures per video frame). Taking full advantage of a "proper" camera takes additional equipment (tripod/gimbal / lights / microphones / decent lenses).

Definitely. A modern iPhone can do a pretty fantastic job at capturing a somewhat cinema verite sort of video--with appropriate eye and editing. For relatively modest expenditure, you can take that to the next level. But it probably requires hauling around a lot of gear and being less spontaneous.

I was fairly interested in video at one point when film (Super-8) was just transitioning to video. But it was all such a hassle that I pretty much just kept to still. An iPhone (or a videocam that's a few hundred dollars) would have been so great.

A single clip that looks somewhat good, sure. A set of clips with a consistently good look, without any additional gear? Not so much.

That permanently enabled tone mapping and noise reduction is actually a huge obstacle in post where you have to give your video clips the look you want and match them to glue into a single video. And you should always use a gimbal, even just a simple mobile one: no matter how good the built-in stabilization is, without a gimbal you'll have parallax and shaky uncorrectable motion blur when shooting handheld on the move, especially in closeup shots. And external lenses and especially ND filters are a thing too in mobile video making, in fact they are super useful.

Vendors like Apple spend a lot of money marketing the idea of effortless video making to consumers, but the reality is that even a high quality video blog requires a lot of attention to detail and careful planning. Point and click and "one size fits all" philosophy works much worse for video than it does for photo.

Yes of course, if it's for a professional production (and these days even many Youtube videos are professional productions) a (semi)-pro camera has a lot more headroom. But it will require knowledge, experience and additional equipment to better what an iPhone will do out of the box.

This video is quite a good illustration, pitting an iPhone 12 Pro against a Sony A7iii (a quite respectable camera): https://youtu.be/TrEdAKCHSZg With these default settings the A7iii is blowing out the highlights in the sky, the church and the swan. Which could have been prevented by choosing one of the Log settings but then it would have required making adjustments during video editing.

If it's for taking a video of family / kids and sharing it immediately with friends/family, the iPhone will produce better results with minimal effort (and that's not to mention having to bring a heavy camera, lenses, tripod/gimbal, accessories).

Although once you're getting into "proper" cameras, you're probably also talking about at least a tripod, maybe steadicam, at that point. But, yes, once you're at 4K, I'd definitely be thinking about other ways to move to the next level than higher resolution.

This is a great point. Part of what I’ve liked about iPhone shot videos is sound and stabilization.

So maybe there are some of those aspects which dedicated cameras could do better without stepping up the resolution.

Traditional cameras--and the more traditional you get the truer this probably gets--have been fairly, well, terrible is probably not too overstated in software. One could probably make nationalistic--or at least industry related--comments related to that but I won't. (BTW I have significant Canon and Fuji systems.) It's also probably the case that the buyers of those cameras were traditionally fine with software that was pretty hands-off.

But, yes, if you combined APS-C Fuji, say, with the software available in an iPhone you'd have a really impressive instrument and presumably we'll get there some day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com